Page 101 of Eyes of Kings

“Tsosia,” Bibi says when she sets the cleric down. “We have to end the qi block. There are people in San-Er who can fight back.”

Tsosia is shaking her head.

“Ending the block,” she whispers, and there’s a strange rattle in her lungs, “will mean handing over the capital when the Weisannas come back.”

Bibi glances up. At the skies, the dry skies. By the time this attack ends and the invaders withdraw, the twin cities will be reduced to rubble. If the clerics are holding on merely so they can get a shot at killing the Weisannas once they march through, they would be occupying San-Er no longer, but a mass graveyard.

“Will you doom your home just to bite your thumb at the Weisannas?” Bibi asks. “Or will you save the people you hoped to lead?”

Tsosia is trying to say something.Palace… palace…, Bibi catches, and she leans in, bringing her ear closer.

“The palace must fall.”

Bibi grips Tsosia’s wrist. “It will,” she whispers. “Rebels will continue to be born, time and time again, unto infinity. But the gods are here now. And they don’t want us to die.”

The earth is soft beneath her. The earth, from which mortals are born and where mortals go to die. Tsosia, her eyes closed, jerks her arm. At first, Bibi thinks that she is hurting the cleric with her grip. She releases quickly. Tsosia offers her arm again, and this time, Bibi catches a flash of a sigil underneath the woman’s sleeve.

“Tsosia?” Bibi murmurs.

“Cut it,” Tsosia whispers. Her energy is waning.

The cleric is barely conscious when Bibi pushes up her sleeve. Bibi pulls a blade. She understands. There was liability in painting sigils on the wall, of course. Wide-scale collapse would bring the block down. So they put the true marker on themselves instead. Posted enough of the clerics around the perimeter to surround San-Er, to cast the work of the sigil.

But when one link along the chain breaks, the shield will too. Bibi winces and cuts into Tsosia’s sigil with a deep slash.

Qi returns to San-Er.

And light begins to flare.

CHAPTER 46

Anton’s head is bleeding.

He regains consciousness with his every thought scrambled, barely able to make sense of where he is, what he’s done. A horrible whine rings through his ears. His vision is unfocused. Some racket is sounding nearby.It’s cold, he thinks—who has left the window wide open?

In a snap, he recalls his circumstances. Waiting, waiting until the last possible moment beside Calla’s body. Still, she did not return. The sun threatened to rise, and Anton stashed her where she would not be seen from the road. His heart thudding as he ran for the horse, as he rode into Actia.

His conversation with August. Sinoa Tuoleimi, waiting outside the window and throwing him back in a rage. They’re gone now. They left him.

Anton winces, hurtling to his feet.

If she’s not here, why are her rebels attacking us?

Thunder rolls over the desert. It is only in its wake that Anton isolates the clash of swords, the clang of metal as it parries and strikes flesh. Anton staggers out from the yamen, scrambling to gather his bearings. The line of Weisannas that he pushed through earlier—it has moved. As have the rural dwellers who were making a ruckus, though he supposes most of them have fled.

Because the battlefield has formed right outside the yamen.

Sand dunes swirl with the wind. August is nowhere to be found. His lithephysique and his blond hair make him an easy mark during a battle, which also makes it immediately obvious when he is not present. Anton performs a second sweep of the vast scene before him, confirming that August has surely fled.

Sinoa Tuoleimi, meanwhile, has found herself a sword. Her sleeves are rolled back. Her skirts blow to either side of her. Every surface of her skin is covered in sigils. Meanwhile, her attackers are dressed in white. Typical for those who operate near the snow—near the borderlands, up in Rincun.

Anton slinks forward. In the direction of a body he’s spotted half-buried in the sand. How long was he out? One minute? Ten? This battle must have broken out fast if August didn’t spare the time to put a knife in his throat and kill him while he was down. Anton reaches the dead guard, her blue eyes unblinking. Anton takes the sword from her hand.

Then he swipes a finger along the blood on the blade and finishes the half-drawn sigil he had prepared on his arm. His father’s sigil. King of the heavens, the most powerful god among the pantheon. Anton feels the rush of qi as a sensation unlike anything else. Light trembling in his every cell, flaring in his veins.

Others on the battlefield sense it too, because they turn toward him.

Anton moves. He can’t fathom what spurred rebels from Rincun to attack in Actia, but they do not act to combat him, so he must assume they are on his side. He slashes at a Weisanna, moving on without pause.